25/07/2008

From the Feuilletons

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Other newspapers 19.07.2008

Ariane Mnouchkine has filmed three YouTube videos with her theatre group and some Chinese dissidents to call for a boycott of the Olympic Games. The least she expects from President Sarkozy is that he boycotts the opening ceremony, she says in an interview with Liberation: "It was intellectually dishonest of Sarkozy to justify himself by saying that we cannot boycott 1.2 billion Chinese. It's not about opposing a people, but opposing its leaders."

With the Bayreuth festival opening today, July 25, Eleonore Büning asks why are there so few decent Wagner singers left? Because "singers are hired the according to typecasts," answers one of the top Wagner singers, mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier, "but above all on the basis of how low-maintenance they are. In addition, there are all the 'Quereinsteiger' in the ranks of the stage directors. (Quereinsteiger are people who make a lateral career change.) That would be the equivalent of letting me perform an operation to remove somebody's appendix ÄÂÂ I have no idea how that works, but as a 'Quereinsteiger' I'd get to have a go anyway. That's how we get a situation where there are two stories being simultaneously told on stage which have a life of their own instead of running parallel. So I'm stood there asking myself whether I should be identifying with what I'm singing or with what I'm supposed to be doing. That is schizophrenic. (...) I remember a performance of Parsifal in Munich where I ran backstage screaming after the second act and we looked at each other and asked: What are we actually doing here? What is happening between us? I'm saying one thing, but doing another. You can only survive that by putting up a fight. So I go back on-stage and I do as I think it should be done. The younger colleagues don't dare, they just automatically perform as they are told. And so we have a singer crisis on our hands."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 22.07.2008

Bernadette Conrad goes to Zagreb to meet Croatian writerZoran Feric, who writes with much "borderline unbearable" humour and explains his affinity for the the drastic: "Actually, there are lots of things which are which have a different emotional charge for me than for others. Funerals for example are pleasant social events, I find. Everything becomes altered the closer you get to it. For me, this is exactly the business of literature: to smash the accepted images."

Die Tageszeitung 22.07.2008

Iranian film score composer and pianist Peyman Yazdanian talks in an interview about musical life in his country, musical taste of Iranians and the difficulties of finding good musicians since the revolution: "As an Iranian composer, it is not a good idea to write elaborate brass movements. With violins it is a little better. But now as then, we cannot record a string orchestra in one go, but have to use certain editing tricks. Put simplistically, we use the talented musicians as the core part of the sound and then add others in as their shadow to provide depth."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 23.07.2008

Jürgen Ritte concedes that debate surrounding the literary qualities of Ernst Jünger is one of the most persistent Franco-German misunderstandings. He is, however, in favour of the recent inclusion of Jünger's 'War Diaries' in the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade: "They contain thoughts which symptomatically and representatively assimilated and sublimated a powerful and fatal era. Such undertakings, regardless of literary worth, help us more than fantasy versions like those of Jonathan Littell."

Die Tageszeitung 24.07.2008

Semiran Kaya was at the trial of Hrant Dink's murderers in Istanbul and has bad news: "After one officer confirmed that the murder plans were known well in advance, and subsequently hushed up, two military officers who were accused of the cover-up, replied that they were acting on information concerning the name 'Krant' not 'Hrant', and since their research had uncovered no one with this name, there was no one who could have been protected. (...) Such was the tone throughout the trial. Dressed in suits, the closely guarded main defendants were behaving like they owned the place. They didn't miss a single opportunity to be offensive, posing with the Hitler salute and even shouting down the defence counsel with 'You idiot!' They threaten the prosecution in case it is tempted to ask 'the wrong questions' and they have threatened one witness with a throat-slitting gesture."

Frankfurter Rundschau 25.07.2008

In reply to a critical open letter by Herta Müller (more here), the head of the Romanian Cultural Institute, Horia Roman Patapievici, who issued an invitation to two former Securitate informants whom he personally considers to be a "plague", writes: "As a representative of the Romanian Cultural Institute, however, I am duty bound to comply with the principle which forbids me to utilise state institutions to push through my personal convictions."

Barack Obama in Berlin

Yesterday Barack Obama spoke in Berlin to eager crowds packing the streets in front of the angel-topped Victory Column. Writing for der Spiegel Gerhard Spörl is still utterly intoxicated by the experience. "Anyone who saw him make the short way from the Victory Column in Berlin to the podium saw a man with the serious gait of a basketball player, a man who seemed young, decisive and focused. For those who witnessed his appearance in Berlin, it is hard to imagine that John McCain has any chance. McCain is 25 years his senior, a man who because of the torture he endured in Vietnam is in constant pain - unable to comb his hair or lift his arm in celebration. Europe is witnessing the 44th president of the United States during this trip. Anyone who listens to him realizes that he is not only ambitious but is also out to lay claims." To being a "world president", for example.(Watch Obama's speech here)

The satire magazine Titanic was on the case on the night before the great event: "The story so far: This evening at 9.55 pm Senator Barack Obama landed with Senator Obama's plane in Berlin, to meet with Obama's counterpart, Merkel, at 11. Then Chancellor Merkel heartily shook Obama's hand. Shortly after 12.20, Obama took his first break to readjust Obama's tie with his very own hands, eat a quick Obama-snack (fishfingers) and to freshen up Obama. By now Obama is heading for the toilet on Obama's feet. New events are happening by the second. Stay tuned!"

For the Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung, Marcus Jauer reports on the meeting between Obama and the Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier: "15:11 and the second photo opportunity with Steinmeier lasted just fifteen seconds. 'Did he say anything?' one photographer asks. When there was no reply, he asked: 'Did he breathe?'"

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic

The other top story in the feuilletons was the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the war criminal and former president of the Srpska Republic. Why did it take so long to arrest him? Modern mass murderers, writes Gustav Seibt in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, obviously find it easy to stay in hiding: "The most important thing for an identity change is a structured daily routine: regular mealtimes, rising punctually in the morning, travelling with the bus or train to work and back home again, putting your feet up for a few hours and then getting an early night. A daily routine settles the new existence, confidence is a question of practice."

"The perpetrators are charged but the consequences of their crimes remain," writes Bosnian authorDzevad Karahasan in the Tagesspiegel, and criticises the West for backing the continued existence of Bosnia-Herzogovina's constituent Republic of Srpska. Karadzic is no more than a spectre today: "Mass murder, mass rape, mass expulsion have taken place in his name. But he was a small light which was lit by others. Milosevic and a handful of generals have been charged but the countless bureaucrats behind the scenes, the war profiteers and the rabble-rousing ideologues live their lives with impunity. They still have their jobs in the state administrations, the universities and academies and the media of the former Yugoslavia."

Kosovar Albanian writerBeqe Cufaj is concerned about what former-Yugoslavs and Europeans will do with Karadzic, now they've got him. He wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "The criminals want to say to us: We didn't fall out of the sky. We were your representatives. We are normal people, just like you. It's just coincidence that we put ourselves into certain difficult situations and had to make decisions which then turned out to be wrong and, yes, terrible... It is up to us to reject this sort of talk. Evil deeds corrupt their doers, and they spawn more evil deeds time and time again. We all have to question our own responsibility. But this will not diminish the guilt of the perpetrators. They are not our scapegoats."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÄÂ ÄÂ about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more